Word: smug
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...from an America full of self-confidence." But U.S. officials deny they intend to be vindictive. "We're not going to use the gulf situation to make exorbitant demands," says a State Department official. In fact, a confident America may find it easier to deal with a rich, sometimes smug Japan. It is when the U.S. feels threatened that it attempts to contain its rival...
...curiously familiar third-person singular: "He's dug in along the border . . . He's taking quite a beating . . . If he heads north, we'll cut him off." As long as he was invisible, he was easy to imagine as one of half a million clones of Saddam himself, smug, defiant and murderous...
...become smug and self-satisfied," Dershowitz said. "This is the beginning, you have an obligation, the future is in your hands...
...British literature states simply that it is of a higher quality. Such a position would probably be thrown out on a campus where the British scholars did not so overwhelmingly outnumber their American counterparts, but to pretend that literature is evaluated or prized by its "artistic value" alone is smug and ignorant. Shelley called poets "the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Literature establishes a dialogue of ideas, and is therefore an inherently political act. Writers frequently use whatever they consider as the political, social, or structural subtext of their contemporaries' works either as touchstones or models for their own representations...
...gone, and a few signs of middle-age complacency are appearing. Although Esprit clothing ads have not yet overwhelmed plugs for homeopathic remedies, the Reader is almost obsessive in its baby boomerism, with recent covers on dream houses, good schools and growing old. Some critics now call the Reader smug, self- satisfied, a bit too yuppified, and say it has sacrificed some edge to gain a broader audience. "There's a big chance they will lose their identity," says Samir A. Husni, a University of Mississippi associate journalism professor and magazine watcher. It sounds like the kind of thirtysomething problem...